Fledgling Song

von Gohren Abbey

Description

Fledgling Song traces the thought life and wanderings of Claire Sivert, a young Canadian woman living and studying biology in France. Caught between the wilderness landscapes of her native Manitoba and the winter-gray cityscapes of Paris, she struggles to find a firm footing. Besides yearning for a sense of place, she is also caught between two eras of her life. Painfully vivid memories from her childhood and tentative hopes rooted in the present intermingle as she moves through her days and records her musings in her faithful journal. Full of wonder and yet delicately unsure of herself, Claire learns through several encounters with new friends how to be bold and face her past and present, however imperfect.

Informations

• Publié par: eLectio Publishing
• Date de parution: 30 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611879773
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFO
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FLEDGLING SONG
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fledgling Song
By Abbey von Gohren
Copyright © 2013 by Abbey von Gohren
Cover Copyright © 2013 by eLectio Publishing
Cover Photograph by Abbey von Gohren

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (eLectio Publishing) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return it to your eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.


eLectio Publishing wishes to thank the following people who helped make these publications possible through their generous contributions:
Chuck & Connie Greever
Jay Hartman
Darrel & Kimberly Hathcock
Tamera Jahnke
Amanda Lynch
Pamela Minnick
James & Andrea Norby
Gwendolyn Pitts
Margie Quillen

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Anabel Unraveled by Amanda Romine Lynch
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www.eLectioPublishing.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Robbie and Henry Lewis for being my very first readers, for showing me how to recognize beauty in language, and for teaching me that a love of words is expressed by editors and poets alike. (Not to mention that this book may not have seen the light of day without you!)

To my husband, Karl, who reads me best of all. I love you.

Many thanks to Gabrielle Sedita and Elizabeth Brahy, for many café meetings and cross-Atlantic edits at the very beginning of this winding story.

Thank you to my dear Lisa Heaner for her careful-and enraptured-readings.

My sincere gratitude to the wonderful literary family that has adopted me at eLectio Publishing. Thanks to Jesse Greever and Christopher Dixon for reading my work, offering their encouragement and guidance, and sparking a relationship for hopefully many fruitful years to come.

To all my readers at www.lifelongfling.blogspot.com : thank you for your faithful and exuberant following over the years.

Finally, merci à Paris . I couldn't have done it without you.
FLEDGLING SONG

This place is as sodden as the summer wetlands that I know. A grey haze lies low in the landscape, permeates the air, diffuses the sunlight into a pale imitation. Nearby, Canada geese honk out of impatience, and finally lay full on their horns in a chorus of protest. A few redwing blackbirds attempt to keep the peace, but their jeering whistles go ignored for the most part. If I listen carefully underneath the din, I can catch the ambient hum of the insects which rises and fades erratically like an old electric motor . . . .
***
Claire put down her pen and sighed. The sound of the dehumidifier was not really like that of the cicadas from her Manitoba home, but she had believed it-if only for a second. She leaned over from her perch on the radiator and eyed her present surroundings through the green metal shutters, cocked open just barely wide enough to focus on a narrow sample of the rue de l’Hopitâl. An otherwise calm morning was punctuated by drivers gustily airing their ire at a nearby intersection, while a bored police officer directed the impatient vehicles.
The drone of the machine in the corner was growing tiresome, but Claire had resolved to put up with it, mostly to please her neighbor. The gray man who lived one floor below had gone to the trouble of wrangling the ancient-looking contraption up the crooked flight of stairs that separated his door from hers, and she figured that her thanks echoed in the incessant rumble in the floorboards. Claire had felt a little knot of excitement form in her stomach when he had knocked. Her first visitor in four months. His close-knit eyebrows were usually focused inward and seemed to warn: do not disturb. But she often wondered about him, his solitary life. He could have been her grandfather. On Sundays, she would lay her head on the rough floor and strain her ear to listen whether anyone came to visit. So far, there had been nothing but silence.
Until that morning, that is, when he had materialized on her doorstep and opened his mouth to speak. His words seemed filtered through the mass of wiry, silver whiskers. He was gruff but friendly, and delivered the machine with a cheery warning,
“Make sure if it sputters, you stand back. The last time it shorted out, I got a devil of a shock.” Claire smiled nervously and offered him a towel for his hands and face, already glistening with beads of moisture from standing in her doorway. She thanked him profusely.
“Er-monsieur,” she almost said sir, falling into English, as his accent was unmistakably non-French. However, some odd sense of propriety kept her speaking a language foreign to the both of them. “When should I-”
“Don’t worry about returning it until May. Beh, you’ll need it.” One knowing eye glinted from under the shelter of his black brow, and lifting his hat, he wished her a bonne journée. Closing the door on his broad, square back, Claire peered skeptically at the special delivery. She walked past it gingerly to a minuscule square of Formica in the corner and started the tea kettle, which, depressingly, raised the dew point even higher. After a long moment, she tentatively plugged it in, and picked up her notebook where she had left off.
***
The water forms in pools at the base of the windowsills. Sometimes I have to clear away the mold that begins to encroach around these ponds, and I imagine what the discolored water would look like under a microscope. Probably nothing terribly interesting-maybe some bacteria if I were lucky. Amoebae finding themselves worlds away from their place of origin, cramped in a tiny spot of water, instead of the broad woods and wilds. At least they’re meant to be aquatic creatures. Ah, me. I long for an arid northern tundra. If only these droplets hanging about everything would cling to one another instead, and form a flurry of frozen beauties. Yes, precipitation would be infinitely more appreciable in the form of snow.
***
The only oasis of dry heat in her apartment was the radiator, which was almost painfully hot. She usually sat on it anyway, and a pleasant burn would seep into her bones. Spots on her jeans still damp from the washing would finally disappear. Normally, her laundry had to hang on a flimsy drying rack for days. It was one of her funny little ways of economizing that became a burden more than anything. I’m a poor student; this is the way things are. Claire sighed and looked at the T-shirts and underwear drooping under the weight of the wet room, just as soggy as the day before. She thought of the laundromat two blocks away with industrial-sized tumblers. Maybe she could even go for a turn herself and dry out her waterlogged brain. Something potent in this suggestion finally broke the dreary spell about her. She hopped down, pulled on a pair of worn-toed boots, and waded through the marsh of her apartment to gather everything into one bundle. It lay heavy on her back, breathing more clamminess down her neck. As she clumped noisily down the wooden staircase, a voice echoed up from the landing below.
“Alps…blanket…snow,” the syllables bounced in the drafty stairwell. She tried to distinguish the foreign brogue she had heard earlier that morning, but it must have been someone further down. This enviable person, whoever it was, seemed to be recounting an early ski escapade. But the three words that Claire caught were like an arrangement of dots for connecting and filling in at will. Which, of course, she did. The resulting image was too bright and wonderful to believe, though she did for a short moment. She imagined herself boarding the next train east into the mountains, where a white powder of considerable volume and heft could fill in an entire valley, cover and hush her into a deep sleep.
Ridiculous. She cursed the reality that suddenly crashed through the brilliant ice castle and brought it shattering to the ground. What makes me think I can afford a holiday , she muttered under her breath. I have nothing but a few greasy coins in my pocket, and even those should be going for a half-baguette rather than hot air. She entered the laundromat and saw that the dry